Contributor.

Kyla YeomanMercy Corps

Kyla Yeoman is the program manager for Global Envision, a blog managed by Mercy Corps focused on market-based solutions to poverty. Before joining Mercy Corps, Kyla was a senior account executive atJascula/Terman and Associates, a Chicago-based public affairs firm. She handled media relations, stakeholder engagement and special events for a variety of nonprofit and private sector clients. Prior to working in public relations, Kyla was a communications associate atCounterpart International, an international development organization in Washington, DC. Her role included writing and editing collateral materials for donors, developing a media toolkit for field staff, and collecting beneficiary stories in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Senegal.

Posts by Kyla Yeoman

When specialty coffee buyers visit coffee bean farmers, they usually want to taste the coffee for the flavor nuances, discuss price differentials, volumes, and delivery months. They don’t usually ask whether the kids are going hungry. Keurig Green Mountain doesn’t want to leave that question unasked anymore. And the company is not alone.

About 40 percent of Filipinos live on less than $2 a day. This poverty has been made all the more difficult following the typhoon that destroyed or damaged more than a million homes. Rather than handing out paper vouchers or physical cash, Mercy Corps partnered with the Philippines’ only purely mobile-based bank, BPI Globe BanKO (BanKO) on an electronic cash transfer program.

LISA is a mobile social network platform for registered farmers to ask agriculture experts and other farmers questions through SMS (text) messages. It was created by Mercy Corps’ partner 8Villages as part of the aid agency’s Agri-Fin Mobile program.

Professional conferences are usually heavy on information and light on emotion. But participants at Friday’s Mobile Money conference were treated to as impassioned a debate as you’re likely to see in a roomful of financial services practitioners and academics. The combatants: a banker and a telco representative competing in the mobile financial services space in Africa.

Center for Effective Global Action at the University of California Berkeley hosted “Mobile Money: Technology to Transform Transactions” – a conference sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation this week. With mobile money entrepreneurs and representatives from large firms

Expedia doesn’t make planes. It doesn’t run planes and it doesn’t own planes. But it sends millions of people on trips every year. Charity: water doesn’t make, run or own wells. But thousands have been dug on its dime.

In northern Uganda, 20 years of violent conflict forced hundreds of thousands of farmers to wait in aid camps, leaving the land fallow and an agriculturally-based economy destroyed. Now, with the closure of the camps and a growing peace, farmers are building back and reinvesting in the land. But a lack of tractors could keep the region hungry.

Indonesia has millions of micro-entrepreneurs and thousands of micro-finance institutions. But most lack capital and established systems, and can only provide bare-bones services to small client bases. Enter Bank Andara, a wholesale commercial bank exclusively dedicated to serving the Indonesian micro-finance sector.